Soldiers Live

148

Glittering Stone: And the Daughters of Time

We saw lights from way out. What was that? There are no lights on the glittering plain. We climbed a thousand feet. By then the lights were gone except for what came out of the hole in the dome over the top of the demon's throne room. Before we got there that went away, too.

Then we were too busy getting Lady and Tobo through the hole to worry about anything else. Rheitgeistiden are trouble when their riders are not helping.

When we got to the floor we found only one oil lamp burning on that old man's—that scholar from Taglios's—worktable. Croaker left a note. And, that clever old fart, he wrote it in our language. Not very good, but good enough to understand.

I guess he did have the gift for tongues like he always said.

Arkana took the lamp and used it to fire up a couple of lanterns. We went off to look for Croaker. She said, "You know, he was always teasing us but after a while I did start feeling almost like he was my dad." We never ever talk about our real fathers. We would never get along.

"Yeah. He looked out for you. Maybe more than you know."

"You, too."

We found Croaker sitting beside the wooden throne. "Hey. He's still breathing."

"I don't think... Shit. Look. Those knives are all gone from the demon." Actually, they were laying all over the floor.

So just then the demon's eyes open and so do Croaker's and both of them look pretty confused and it is only then that I really understand what Croaker was trying to tell us in his letter. It was not some confused religious good-bye, he just did not have enough of the right words to tell us that he and the demon had it worked out to trade places. So Shivetya got to become a mortal for as long as Croaker's body would last and Croaker got to be a big, old, wise sea dragon swimming all around in the ocean of history. So both of them got to go to heaven. And the Nef were happy. And the plain went on. And the white crow kept bitching, riding around on the Croaker body's shoulder. And Arkana and I got in a running fight about who was going to go on keeping the Annals, because both of us hate to write.

So we take turns. When the little tramp will get away from Tobo long enough to pick up a pen and do her part.

A point she missed, probably because she is too dim to notice, is that Lady is recovering. A while ago I saw her spinning tiny fireballs. I think if there was some way she could make love to that big monster over there she would do it three times a day. Because it is from him that the power flows. It is, probably, the best and most meaningful gift he has ever given her and with it she can become anything she wants to be. Maybe even the young and beautiful and romantically sorrowful and remote Lady of Charm again.

But then he would have to turn Soulcatcher loose just to give balance to the world.

I wonder if he was right when he said a thousand years from now we might be the gods everyone remembers.

And I wonder what he might do about his daughter. His flesh daughter. I think there is no hope for her because she has no hope of her own, but I also think that if there is a hope, Pop will find it.

Suvrin is looking impatient. He wants to hitch a ride down to the Hsien shadowgate. He is not Aridatha Singh but he may have to do.

I guess it is time to go see our new world. The Abode of Ravens. The Land of Unknown Shadows. Shukrat says the names have a ring. That it sounds like home to her.

I think home is what I carry around inside me. I am a snail with the meat on the outside.

And it is Shukrat's damned turn to write. The sneaking, slacking little bimbo.

Incessant wind sweeps the plain. It murmurs on across grey stone, carrying dust from far climes to nibble eternally at the memorial pillars. There are a few shadows out there still but they are the weak and the timid and the hopelessly lost.

It is immortality of a sort.

Memory is immortality of a sort.

In the night, when the wind dies and silence rules the place of glittering stone, I remember. And they all live again.

Soldiers live. And wonder why.